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[C4lv1n]

I just got back into the game after several years, pretty sure the last version I played was in the 0.31 series of releases. (Oh man, just looked up when those were released, it really has been a while) I've been playing a bit over the past week to try to get back into it, and have made it to the 102-11-06 on a world that started with 100 years of history. I've got the basics down, farming, limited military, a rough sketch of an entrance labyrinth, etc. But as I dig into the game I find myself with more questions, particularly about the new features that have been added since I last played. To that end, I have the following questions:

1. Were the size of migrant waves massively increased at some point? Maybe my fort is just doing better economically then how I used to play, but I had a single wave with 50 migrants, at at my current in game date I've already gotten up to a population of 116. Is this some artifact of how site to site interaction works?

2. Were the number of children similarly increased? Even considering that I've got 116 dwarves, the fact that 23 of them are children is surprising. And only just recently have two more matured to adulthood, so counting the one death I had there were at one point 26 children in a fort of 116 dwarves. I never needed the child cap before, is this just odd luck, or is it more common to get children in waves now?

3. How well, or how poorly, do multi-depot setups work? I'd like to be able to set up two different depots, one for dwarves and other friendly creatures that's near to the finished goods stockpiles and easily accessible by my broker. The other would be for elves, goblins, and other creates of little actual worth. It would of course have all sorts of interesting features available at the pull of a lever. The idea would be to use a pair of drawbridges to restrict pathing to one or the other depending on the time of year and the caravans that will be coming that season. The wiki suggests that such a setup may still cause problems, but I don't see any concrete examples there. Does anyone have experience with something like this? The reason I don't to simply set traps on a single-depot system is that I'd like to put the trap depot somewhere into my entrance labyrinth so I've got a failsafe if some of the caravan guards or animals get loose and aren't killed by the depot traps.

4. Even after reading the wiki I'm still unclear on how building destroyers interact with bridges. Here's my best guess, tell me if I'm wrong: When the bridge is down then destroyers will not attack it, even if they could, because they'd like to be able to path across it. When the bridge is up it is invincible to building destroyers. Previously I'd just put a pit or moat under the bridge that would prevent direct access to it when raised, but with the ability for monsters to climb I'm not sure that would actually prevent creatures from getting up to it.

5. For ideal training, would this be the best way to organize squads? Archers in single person squads, set to train. They'd each have no barracks, but would instead have a single archery target. Maybe they can share, but it's not like they're expensive so I'd probably give each dwarf their own target. Melee dwarves would be in two person squads, also set to train in a barracks. In theory this forces archers to train on the targets instead of beating on each other with their crossbows, and forces the melee dwarves into two person sparring. Right?

6. Finally, is there a manual or doc I can read on the Perfect World utility? I would very much like an embark location with a volcano on flat land near a river, ideally in a heavily forested biome. But considering I can only ever get a couple of volcanos per max sized world I haven't had much luck trying to find such a location. I thought that Perfect World would be perfect for creating such a thing, but I honestly cannot fathom how to get it working or how I'd use it to generate a regular map and just add a few volcanos.

[PatrikLundell]

I started playing with 0.40.06 or so, so I don't know much about your baseline.

1. Migrant wave size varies quite a lot. I use the pop cap to keep the waves down to reasonable sizes (set to current pop + 10 after each wave).

2. Varies a lot as well. I've never played with the child cap myself, but I've seen a fair bit of complaints about being inundated by children. As far as I understand the child cap doesn't affect migrants, only local births, anyway.

3. Very poorly. There are various bugs associated with multiple trade depots. If it can be made to work at all, you probably have to close off the extra ones completely for it to work (i.e. not only close the outer access, but the inner one as well). Goblins never trade in vanilla, by the way.

4. Bridges can not be attacked by building destroyers. Lowered bridges can still be destroyed by dragon fire (directed at something else, such as an elven caravan member), and trying to atom smash creatures too large for it destroys the bridge. Trying to raise/open a bridge when too large a creature is on it does nothing, i.e. the bridge isn't raised/opened, the lever changes state, but the bridge itself is unharmed.

5. I don't do marksdwarves due to their suicidal tendencies and inability to move into range to take on flying targets, so others will have to comment on them. Training in general is reasonably fast, so I just set squads to train in barracks. My citizen militia squads are made up of dorfs who have mooded and are set to train 1-2 months per year. Note that you need to manually allocate barracks when they go on training and deallocate the barracks when the go off training, or they'll spend most of their off duty time on individual training in the barracks rather than the civilian work they're supposed to perform.

6. If I've understood Perfect World correctly, you start with some kind of elevation map and generate a world from there, which is where I gave up trying to understand it. I use PSV worlds instead and then use my DFHack scripts to to modify things to my liking.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161188.msg7228166#msg7228166 for PSV world generation/editing.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=164658.msg7495705#msg7495705 for pre embark (and world gen) world editing.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=164136.msg7454345#msg7454345 for manipulation of the future embark (including adding a volcano).

[Urist9876]

Archers do not need to be in single person squads.

If they only have archery targets, they will do some training on those.
They need discipline or other stats raised before they go stand at the target all day.
I often assign them their own barracks too. There they will do some other training that can be useful. It helps to make them more willing to practise at the target after a while.

Once they start training all day at the target the biggest issue will be the training bolts. At legendary +5 you better assign them to a squad with no or maybe only one target. They will keep firing bolts, without gain.

[HmH]

5. Just got through setting it up myself. Wiki guide is unstructured, easy to misread, so I'm laying things out in steps.

1) Make a squad with as many marksdwarves as you want. Make sure they have crossbows assigned to them, not "individual ranged weapons". Make sure you have quivers for them, too.

2) Go to Ammunition, select their squad. It allows for 250 bolts of any material. Change it to 1000-2000 bolts of wood, set for combat and training both. (Or 100-200 bolts per dwarf, if you plan on having fewer than 10 in the squad)

3) Go to Schedules - and here's the tricky part. There are TWO lists of orders in this screen - one is a table with squads on the top and months on the left, and one is below that table, a list that by default has only one order: "Train, 10 minimum". You want the list below to have 10 orders "Train, 1 minimum" instead of one "Train, 10 minimum".
To do that, first delete the default order with x, then press o. New screen appears. Press o until "Train" is selected. Press / to set minimal number to 1. Press enter.
Now you have given the squad one order out of ten. Without switching to any other months, do the same nine more times.

4) Now you have the right orders for one month out of twelve. Copy orders for that month and paste them for the other eleven.

5) Build Archery Targets, set them as barracks andassign them to the squad for training. One target will only be used by one dwarf, so build one for each dwarf you train.

And now they should train, as many as are currently available. If you had one "Train, 1 minimum" order in the bottom list in Schedules, as I'd done at first, you'd have only one dwarf training at any time.

[Robsoie]

An alternative way to train your marksdwarves is when you embark on area where there's a lot of flying pest like keas etc...
Make a barrack on the surface near your fortress entrance for your marksdwarves that will train their melee skills there, and they will not stop shooting at the keas/similar flying pests.

Their marksdwarf skill will increase nicely this way.

Though be prepared to make a lot of bolts, wooden and bones bolts work well against flying pests and are easy to produce fortunately (the bones material will come easily with those keas/etc... going down)

[mightymushroom]

Responding to PerfectWorld:

I've seen several questions of this sort, and I think the name misleads people's expectations. PerfectWorld is an external PSV utility for those who find DF's built-in editor too quirky. That's all it does: it translates .bmp or .png files into a list of PSV data points to be used by Advanced World Generation. (Technically, it exports an entire Advanced Generation profile, but the parameters editing is not the big draw here.) It does NOT place individual features. It's useful perhaps if you have a favorite graphics program to use instead of DF, and it has built-in functionality for creating a template all by itself; but it's still pre-gen map stuff rather than placing exactly what you want in the exact place you want it.

(I obtained PerfectWorld via the Lazy Newb Pack -- under the utilities tab, below the list of utilities, there should be a button "Open Readme". It's been a while so I don't remember how easy it is to understand, apologies if you tried this already. Reading up on vanilla Advanced Worldgen and PSV is also recommended.)

If you do go the PSV route, whichever editor you use: I had reasonable success by making a grid of 100% volcanism hotspots that aligned with the corners of world tiles (where the "flat" volcano phenomenon is likely to occur). Then in advanced parameters crank up the number of volcanos to 50 or more (this is important, otherwise it takes too long). I found a single flat volcano after only one or two gens.

Or you can use PatrickLundell's DFHack scripts.

[C4lv1n]

Thanks for the help guys. I might be falling back down the DF rabbit hole.

[anewaname]

3) If you have multiple accessible depots on the map, caravans will choose a depot as soon as they arrive and they will not consider the other depot even if you close gates to block their chosen depot. I do not know what will happen if one depot is already gate-sealed before the caravan arrives. Your deathtrap could still work using one depot room, if both tunnels lead to it and each can be gate-sealed.

5) In HmH's post, he described how to set a group of ten 1-dwarf orders for the archers. You can adjust that for the melee dwarfs as well to encourage sparring. My new (and relatively untested) format for training orders is like this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The axedwarfs are doing a mix that should encourage more sparring (but I haven't watched it enough to be sure that is happening), and the archers will spend 75% of their time on archery and 25% on group training (because I want them to gain in some other skills too).

[C4lv1n]

So I've got 10 marksdwarves and 10 wrestlers, and both have been training for about 3 years in game. And yet, this is what their skills look like after theoretically constant training:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

https://imgur.com/a/Riz4GvF

A few of them have okayish skills, but after 3 years I remain tremendously underwhelmed. The marksdwarves were split into 10 single dwarf squads, each with their own archery target. Their orders are very simple, "Train, minimum 1". From what I understand, this should get them training against the targets almost constantly. And yet, despite having a stockpile of 650 bolts with more being made all the time, they barely ever train. After 3 years I had expected several of them to be pushing Legendary or higher. Actually, after checking their ammo instructions I notice that they're each set to carry 250 bolts of any material and use them for both training and combat. Which is a bit too many for me to expect them to actually all have ammo. I've reduced this to 100 and am in the process of making more. Hopefully that will fix matters a little.

The melee dwarves are split into 5 squads of two, and they're also set to Train, this time with minimum 2. Their skills are a bit better as you can see, but still unimpressive. They were originally equipped with shields, but I removed those after I noticed that their shield skills were far higher than their wrestling skill. My guess was that they were just beating on each other with the shields instead of wrestling and a slight uptick in skill growth seems to suggest that I was correct. But despite training occasionally, their skill growth remains unimpressive after three years of constant training.

And for some reason both squads report in Dwarf Therapist that they lack Leather Boots, despite the fact that "Leather Footwear" is checked off in their in-game equipment screen. That's what the blue boxes in the screenshot are by the way, though ammo is also a reason for some of the marksdwarves since that was taken before I tweaked my ammo settings.

EDIT:: Thought I would mention a trick I'm using.

First is to take advantage of how artifacts and moods work. According to the wiki, if there's any adamantium wafers available to your dwarves, any in a mood will prioritize those over alternative materials. It also appears that the artifact only consumes a single wafer, regardless of what the item in question would require if crafted normally. So I did the reasonable thing and collected a few bits of raw adamantium as quickly as possible after discovering these facts. I've since gone back and done a concerted mining effort, but it's surprisingly easy to get a few wafers early on without too much trouble as long as you're careful. I also checked Dwarf Therapist, and set every single one without a proper moodable skill to be weaponcrafters. Then I profiled my forges so that half were set to only be used by Dabbling weaponcrafters, and the other half to everyone above Dabbling. The first half were set to craft copper bolts on repeat and excluded from manager orders, and the other half handle my regular orders. So pretty much all of my farmers, furnace operators, and peasants in general are now set to go off and craft an adamantine artifact quality weapon if they have a mood.

[anewaname]

So I've got 10 marksdwarves and 10 wrestlers, and both have been training for about 3 years in game. And yet, this is what their skills look like after theoretically constant training:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

https://imgur.com/a/Riz4GvF

A few of them have okayish skills, but after 3 years I remain tremendously underwhelmed. The marksdwarves were split into 10 single dwarf squads, each with their own archery target. Their orders are very simple, "Train, minimum 1". From what I understand, this should get them training against the targets almost constantly. And yet, despite having a stockpile of 650 bolts with more being made all the time, they barely ever train. After 3 years I had expected several of them to be pushing Legendary or higher. Actually, after checking their ammo instructions I notice that they're each set to carry 250 bolts of any material and use them for both training and combat. Which is a bit too many for me to expect them to actually all have ammo. I've reduced this to 100 and am in the process of making more. Hopefully that will fix matters a little.

The melee dwarves are split into 5 squads of two, and they're also set to Train, this time with minimum 2. Their skills are a bit better as you can see, but still unimpressive. They were originally equipped with shields, but I removed those after I noticed that their shield skills were far higher than their wrestling skill. My guess was that they were just beating on each other with the shields instead of wrestling and a slight uptick in skill growth seems to suggest that I was correct. But despite training occasionally, their skill growth remains unimpressive after three years of constant training.

And for some reason both squads report in Dwarf Therapist that they lack Leather Boots, despite the fact that "Leather Footwear" is checked off in their in-game equipment screen. That's what the blue boxes in the screenshot are by the way, though ammo is also a reason for some of the marksdwarves since that was taken before I tweaked my ammo settings.

EDIT:: Thought I would mention a trick I'm using.

First is to take advantage of how artifacts and moods work. According to the wiki, if there's any adamantium wafers available to your dwarves, any in a mood will prioritize those over alternative materials. It also appears that the artifact only consumes a single wafer, regardless of what the item in question would require if crafted normally. So I did the reasonable thing and collected a few bits of raw adamantium as quickly as possible after discovering these facts. I've since gone back and done a concerted mining effort, but it's surprisingly easy to get a few wafers early on without too much trouble as long as you're careful. I also checked Dwarf Therapist, and set every single one without a proper moodable skill to be weaponcrafters. Then I profiled my forges so that half were set to only be used by Dabbling weaponcrafters, and the other half to everyone above Dabbling. The first half were set to craft copper bolts on repeat and excluded from manager orders, and the other half handle my regular orders. So pretty much all of my farmers, furnace operators, and peasants in general are now set to go off and craft an adamantine artifact quality weapon if they have a mood.

Are all of these these one-dwarf archer squads set to Active training? If not, this would explain the minor amount of training as they would only be visiting the archery targets when they have no other jobs, and would stop their archery practice as soon as they were assigned a hauling job.

For ammo, if you have ten squads with one member each and an ammunition setting of 100 bolts per squad, your 600 bolt supply would only provide enough bolts for the first 6 squads (the one squad member would carry 25 bolts and 75 bolts would sit on the ground). If you only have 1-dwarf archer squads, assigning 50 bolts is enough..

For boots, if you crafted "leather high boots" and they are not wearing them, check if the uniform is set to "wear over clothing" or "replace clothing". The "replace clothing" setting often fails with high boots because the dwarf will not remove their pig tail shoes. View the dwarf in DF and see what they are wearing.

Also, look at the Units list sometimes to see what type of military training the dwarfs are doing, that might help understand what the issue is. I look at those military dwarfs and think they are all doing individual combat drills instead of Active training, because with 5 dwarfs in a training order, sooner or later, that guy who knows Mace skill would start a demonstration about how to use one and a bunch of the others would have gained in Mace skill.

I do a similar things with dabbling weaponsmiths and armorsmiths...

[C4lv1n]

Ammo I've got sorted now that I got some more bolts produced, but you were right. The main issue was that they were not set to Active/Training. I'll need to check their uniform settings, but what you describe makes sense based on what I was seeing.

As for my artifact trick. It's been great, and terrible. Good news, I got 6 more new adamantium artifact weapons. Bad news, 4/6 were blunt weapons. A maul, a flail, a morning star, a warhammer... yeah, not great. Did get a battle axe and a longsword though, which is pretty cool I guess.

[feelotraveller]

The warhammer would be perfect for your hammerer.  Just sayin'. 

[Saiko Kila]

As for my artifact trick. It's been great, and terrible. Good news, I got 6 more new adamantium artifact weapons. Bad news, 4/6 were blunt weapons. A maul, a flail, a morning star, a warhammer... yeah, not great. Did get a battle axe and a longsword though, which is pretty cool I guess.

A morning star is a curious case, because its main attack is edge and quite nice. I would test it with a maceman. Maybe it's not that bad. I use morning stars bought from caravans with some of my mercs and dwarves with success.

[Iduno]

As a fellow volcano-lover, I remember having luck with bulk-creating worlds and choosing one that had a site I liked. I learned the trick to it at one point, but I forgot it in another dream. Maybe some kind of command-line magic? Hopefully someone who knows what they're doing can tell you more about that.

I think the trick to crossbow dwarves is making crossbow-only groups. I just don't think they're that good anymore.

And I agree with the giant migrant waves. Unfortunately, shrinking migrant waves by making them come to you through some sort of deadly obstacle course and/or arena now causes negative thoughts, and not just in the dwarves that went through the course.

Edit: I think there's also a thread somewhere about seeds you can use to find the site you want. Someone there may be willing to do the heavy lifting for you/have already done it.